Daddy's helpers

Our most recent household improvement project involves changing the landscaping in our backyard. As you may or may not know, we have an oddly shaped backyard with an unknown property line. (Actually, the men were here today to do the first part of our survey so it pretty soon the mystery will be solved!) The previous owners had chosen to put a koi pond, a patio (that needed to be redone), and an island of bushes and ground cover on the little bit of land that is back there. Before we bought the house, we requested the koi pond be removed, both for safety reasons and for the space. However, we have very little grass back there, a patio we never use because we have a great screened in back porch, and the funky island. Not much of a yard to our backyard.

Last year, Andy and I sat on our wonderful porch and talked about what we could do with the space if we just...and an idea was born. We decided to take out the back patio, removed the island of foliage, and reseed the yard so that they boys had somewhere to play. It's a pretty labor intensive undertaking and being relatively poor, we're doing most of the work ourselves. (Although, I must say thanks to my dad who helped when he was here!)

One of the biggest parts of the project is redoing the patio and, with two kids, it's taking some time. However, as of Sunday we have the majority of the bricks up, have decided how large a patio and path area we really need, and Andy has begun to space things out in preparation for installation. The boys were a big help this past weekend, donning their "work" (or garden) gloves and moving bricks for Daddy. The amount of work they did was pretty impressive, as was the fact that they entertained themselves quite a bit so that I could help Daddy out too.

A side note: The muscle shirts were a "treat" from a recent Walmart trip. Although it goes against Mommy's nature to buy tank tops for the boys, they loved the idea of these muscle shirts and now ask to wear them...often!